The Nahuatl (or Nahua) languages form the southernmost family of the
Uto-Aztecan stock.
Nahuatl has over
a million and a half speakers,
more than any other family of indigenous languages
in Mexico today.
The name “Nahuatl” (pronounced in two syllables,
ná-watl) comes from the root
nahua
([nawa])
which means ‘clear sound’ or ‘command’.

The areas marked in green on the map are the traditional Nahuatl
homelands where the Nahuatl languages are still spoken today.
They include parts of the Federal District (Mexico City)
and of the states of Durango, México, Guerrero,
Michoacán, Morelos, Oaxaca, Puebla, San Luis Potosí,
Tabasco, Tlaxcala, and Veracruz.
Although it does not appear on this map,
the southernmost language in the family is Pipil,
which is spoken in El Salvador.

Nahuatl is known world-wide because of the Aztecs,
also called the “Mexica”
(pronounced approximately “may-she-kah”).
They lived in Mexico-Tenochtitlan
(what is today the center of Mexico City)
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
and were the dominant civilization in Mesoamerica at the time of the Spanish conquest.
Because they spoke a
particular kind of Nahuatl
(Classical Nahuatl),
both the Nahuatl family and even other individual variants
are sometimes called “Aztec” or “Mexicano”.
(The Uto-Aztecan stock is also sometimes called Uto-Nahuatl.)
And of course,
it is from their capital city,
México [mēxihko],
that the modern country of Mexico took its name.